A new bill to regulate mortgages and foreclosures is not expected until after May’s parliamentary election at the earliest, finance ministry spokeswoman Avgi Chrysostomou-Lapathiotis said on Monday.

She told the House finance committee that “we have a bill and we are still working on it” but it must be reviewed by the legal service before being submitted to parliament.

That process, she said, will not be complete before parliament dissolves on April 23, with the bill as such set to be submitted to the House at the earliest after the elections on May 24.

She also told the committee that her ministry wishes to “strengthen the institution of the financial commissioner”, and even make decisions issued by the finance commissioner on debt cases binding, as well as “further utilising the insolvency framework”.

Incumbent financial commissioner Valentina Georgiadou, meanwhile, told the committee that she believes a positive addition to the legislation would be “a way to regulate repayments” following a court decision regarding the amount of debt owed on an outstanding loan.

She also called on the state to “consider the rent-for-instalment option”, also known as the mortgage-to-rent scheme, wherein households struggling with mortgage repayments sell their home to state asset management company Kedipes at 65 per cent of its market value and then pay rent to Kedipes to continue living in the property.

Chrysostomou-Lapathiotis was then asked whether a bill will “soon” be put before the House finance committee, and said that her ministry has collaborated with both Georgiadou and the insolvency department, and that “a bill will come”.

Later, Akel MP Aristos Damianou warned that bills changing the legal framework regarding insolvency and foreclosures may be unconstitutional, while Diko MP Zacharias Koullas called on the government to “immediately” submit a bill to parliament to make the financial commissioner’s decisions binding.

Dipa MP Alekos Tryfonides, meanwhile, said that due to the short amount of time left before parliament’s dissolution, MPs should instead vote to suspend all foreclosures until the end of the year.

Ecologists’ Movement leader Stavros Papadouris accused the government of dragging its feet on the matter, saying that “the reality remains that the finance ministry would rather not do anything because the finance ministry agrees with the current legislative framework”.

As the discussion continued, Georgiadou returned to her earlier suggestion.

“Not everyone is insolvent and not everyone has the intention of deceiving their creditors,” she said, adding that if such a bill were to pass into law, there would be no need to suspend all foreclosures, and “time would be given after the determination of how much debt there is to repay for an arrangement to be made”.

If agreements are reached and then signed, “it can also be documented which borrower is uncooperative or can be considered to be a strategic defaulter,” she said.